Kinky Boots

KINKY BOOTS has an interesting and unusual history. Taken from the true story of a shoe factory in Northampton whose failing business was saved, if temporarily, by moving from making men’s brogues into producing kinky boots for drag queens, it became first the subject of a BBC2 documentary and then a film, and finally a Broadway Tony-award-winning musical that has eventually reached the West End.

(kinkybootsthemusical.co.uk)

The producers of the film created the character of Lola, the drag queen, played by Chiwetel EJiofor (now that’s a film I have to see) and it is he/she and the reluctant inheritor of the shoe factory, Charlie, who form the central characters of the musical. The show makes much of their differences – the provincial down-to-earthness of Charlie versus the exotic otherness of Lola – before making great play of their similarities (they both disappointed and defied their fathers). It is this man-to-man-with-no-sex-involved relationship that’s one of the most unusual things about this show. There’s conventional love interest along the way in the form of Charlie’s fiancée, a London-oriented businesswoman who is replaced by the assistant with a crush – a gloriously funny performance from Amy Lennox. Charlie is played by Killian Donnelly, veteran of virtually every musical running in the West End, and Lola by Matt Henry, whose sole experience as far as I can tell from Googling him – being too mean to buy a programme – is coming fourth on The Voice.

The show is saved by these performances, and by a wonderfully witty script. The weirdness of its hybrid origins – an American-created show about a story set in the English provinces – is evident here and there, and in particular in the character of Charlie, who turns from unassuming Northamptonshire when he speaks into American rock star when he sings. There’s also an American sassiness, not to mention schmaltz, to the script (Harvey Fierstein). There are some creaking plot moments, in particular when Charlie quite uncharacteristically turns on his buddy Lola solely, it seems, to provide us with the subsequent regret-and-making-up moment; and Charlie’s fiancée doesn’t serve much of a purpose (except to give Amy Lennox a wonderfully comedic moment when she realises has a crush on someone else’s man). And there are a couple of puke-making songs which are both unnecessary and out of keeping with the otherwise light-hearted, hilarious and outrageous tone of the rest of the show.

But these days, when the news around us is so grim, there’s nothing like a fun night out to cheer the spirits. The audience was on its feet at the end and I suspect this one will run and run as long and as far as its steel-reinforced stilettos can carry it.